Ann Romney’s Love Story

Ann Romney told the Republican National Convention that she had come to talk about love—“from my heart, about our hearts.” She had been sent to make people love her husband, or to like him, or at least to “humanize” him. Love is useful that way; it is, as she said, a force that “unites us,” a passion, in some hands, that can turn into a broad embrace. And yet, she insisted more on modesty, restraint, and a certain measure of defiance. “This is important. I want you to hear what I am going to say. Mitt doesn’t like to talk about how he helps others, because he see it as a privilege, not as a political talking point.” What kind of political love affair is this?

When Ann entered, dressed in red, the frames on the convention stage filled up with pictures of her as a teen-ager and a young mother. For most of the speech, the pictures never showed her getting much older than that: there were her children, as babies or as preschoolers; there she was, in a Peter Pan collar. Neither, rhetorically, did her husband age much. She said that for her he was still “that boy I met at a high-school dance,” and her memories seemed to get vaguer as Mitt got older: she talked about the business he started, but not what kind of business it was. She also mentioned, several times, how he made her laugh. (No examples were forthcoming.) “You can trust Mitt,” she said. “He will take us to a better place, just as he took me home safely from that dance.” A “better place” might not have been the best phrase; there was already something stultifying about the frozen way we were asked to look at set pieces from their marriage without inquiring too much.

Does love mean not having to talk about politics, or about money? Ann’s contradictions in this respect are not new, but they are revealing, both about her and about her husband’s political program. She has opened up more about what might be seen as intensely personal matters—talking about her illnesses, and, Tuesday morning on CBS, about a miscarriage she had in her forties. (Mitt looked surprised at one point, and, asked about it, said that he hadn’t known how much the loss had upset their youngest son until hearing it then.) But the closer that Ann gets to matters that are properly public—like her husband’s wealth and financial connections, and how they might affect his policies as President—the more insistent her claims to privacy become. Her line about Mitt not liking to talk about how he helps others is baffling on its own—shouldn’t someone who is running for President give us a hint?—and also echoes the shameless explanation that she and her husband gave, in an interview with Parade, for not releasing their tax returns: that it would embarrass them by revealing just how charitable they were, and even impinging on their faith: “One of the downsides of releasing one’s financial information is that this is now all public, but we had never intended our contributions to be known. It’s a very personal thing between ourselves and our commitment to our God and to our church,” Mitt said.

Ann was the most on edge—after a relaxed, genial opening—when she began to talk about her husband’s “success,” as she put it, and what she all but called other people’s jealousy. “You know what, it actually amazes me to see his history of success being attacked,” she said, and asked if we wanted our children to be “afraid of success,” and said that if President Obama had been successful he wouldn’t be “attacking” success. She acknowledged that her husband had started life on firm ground—she mentioned “values” and education, not that he was the son of a governor, auto executive, and Presidential candidate--and then said, “I can tell you Mitt Romney was not handed success—he built it!”

“He built it”—maybe this had to be said. A variation on the line was in pretty much every Republican speech, and written on signs all over the convention hall: “We built it.” It is remarkable to see how much can be made of a misquotation. The reference is to President Obama saying, not that business owners didn’t build anything, but that there were things that helped them, like roads and schools, that no one person can build alone. What is interesting is why the words have such rhetorical force. Part of it is the idea of Obama as a hater of private enterprise; the other, though, is in the “we”—and the character of the implied “they,” the non-builders. In this telling, America is something that was built by people about whom Barack Obama knows and understands nothing. The most remarkable, and dubious, achievement of the Republican convention so far has been to make “we,” the most inclusive word in the English language, into an exclusionary one. The same might be said about love, which in the Romney story acts as a door that closes.

Another apparent rhetorical directive was to mention not just small businesses but “family businesses,” as often as possible. (Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire was especially good at that.) The phrase came up so deliberately and repetitively as to imply a patriotism of inheritance, something that should not be confused with a patriotic heritage.

And where does that leave love? The opening of Ann’s speech—a prelude in which, after an initial hello, Mitt didn’t make much of an appearance—was genuinely moving. She spoke about parents worried about providing for their children and about the particular responsibilities and worries of women; she said that she sometimes thought at night that one could hear “a great collective sigh,” and that “if you listen carefully, you’ll hear the women sighing a little more than the men.” Ann talked about how Mitt would drop everything to help a friend or a congregant, and less about how his policies would affect a stranger, and how they were like millions who “quietly help their neighbors, their churches and their communities” But is a sigh on one side and quiet charity on the other the extent of the political dialogue we’re allowed? Can we be louder, in the day as well as in the night? (Her husband once talked about income disparities being discussed in “quiet rooms.”) What is unlovable about the speech is the vision of political silence, if not quiescence.

Did Ann Romney succeed? Almost—she can be very appealing. A few of her lines, like the one about having not a “storybook marriage” but a “real marriage” will be quoted many times. She is a far better speaker than her husband, though not as good as Chris Christie, who followed her (but who is?). (For his part, he said, “I believe we have become paralyzed by our desire to be loved.”) Ann Romney’s speech was weakest toward the end, and weakened still when the applause was heaviest. That’s when her husband came onstage to congratulate her. At least that seems to have been the idea: as it worked out, there was an embrace, a wave, and an awkward scurry by the boy she met at the dance to get her, and himself, off the stage. There are many things and people Mitt Romney undoubtedly loves; the question is what that has to do with being President.